Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin Page A

of questionable treats: mustard with ale in it, goose liver with blackish mushrooms called “truffles,” English “biscuits” that were actually just dry tasteless crackers, and mottled cheeses that looked and smelled as though they should have been thrown out a long time ago.
    Down below, in the darkened living room, Grandmother Roberts sat in her late husband’s armchair, her swollen legs elevated on the ottoman, listening to her radio programs and keeping watch on the hallway leading to the kitchen. Certain guests had a tendency to pilfer from the Pine Cone’s refrigerator.
    By tomorrow the class was supposed to have read to the end of chapter 11 and updated their life chart on David. “When you finish the book,” Mother Malloy had told them, “you will see the progress of a life on your chart.” Maud had skipped ahead to find out if David would definitely go to live with Mr. Micawber so she could enter his new address on her chart. Assured of that, she could go back to the chapter’s beginnings, where they were just being introduced, and savor the certainty that things were going to get a little better for David, who had been sent away by Mr. Murdstone to wash bottles in a slummy warehouse.
    Not that Maud’s mother had married a villain like Mr. Murdstone and herself died soon after. Lily was very much alive, sometimes embarrassingly so. And now everyone at school, thanks to Lily’s shameless broadcasting, knew that Maud had a respectable father in Palm Beach, and that both he and his wealthy wife, Anabel, had been “captivated” by Maud this past summer, with hints of more benefits to come. Yes, Maud possessed a father every bit as “real” as Tildy’s. Tildy’s father had more gruff masculine charm, but the way the two men spent their days was remarkably similar. Smoky Bear Stratton, with nothing very urgent to do, oiled his guns in the den and rode around town in the front seat with his chauffeur. Cyril Norton, with nothing very urgent to do, drove himself around town in his wife’s second-best Cadillac and was growing fat from snacking in the kitchen while chatting up the cook.
    Far from being sent off to wash bottles in a slum and be mocked by inferiors, Maud was in a top school, with a beautiful teacher everyone worshipped, and once again she had been elected class president—the first time without the help of Tildy’s officious campaigning. The other girls looked up to her, to Maud Norton, and not to that former monster-duo known as “TildyandMaud.”
    Yet why did her heart exult as she reread and savored the passage where David confided to the reader that no words could express the secret agony of his soul as he washed bottles with his low-life companions and felt his hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in his bosom?
    To be “utterly without hope”! What secret agony in her soul corresponded to this? What feelings of shame? What fears that all her learning would pass away from her, little by little? What had happened in her past, or could happen now, to make her plight match his? When everything in her life was going so well, when every school day brought her six hours of proximity with the superior Malloy, what chords were being struck here by this English boy in another century in poverty and despair? And yet they were being struck, over and over, with a pungent ache.
    After the class finished reading and discussing the novel, Mother Malloy expected a five-page paper from each girl. “Please, do not go to the library and look up what others have said about David Copperfield . I will have read any critical works you are likely to find there. I am interested in your experience of the novel. Not ‘What does this mean?’ or ‘What have others said about it?’ or ‘What would impress my teacher?’ but ‘What does this move in my soul?’
    Could you write a paper called “The Pungent Ache of the Soul in David Copperfield”? Malloy encouraged you to think